by Clare Hunter
This was precisely what Judy Chicago exploited in her continued use of needlework to drive forward a feminist arts agenda. The Dinner Party had made her realise just how much sewing could convey to women through its techniques and properties. In her next artwork, The Birth Project, she pushed needlework further, expanding its traditions and technical boundaries to create images of creation myths, women’s own experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, of miscarriage and the state of motherhood. For Birth Tear quilting was used to capture an image of a woman lying in agony, her head thrown back, her hands clasping her spread legs and a long jag of red embroidery depicting the tear itself. Quilting allowed for the fabric to become skin-like – soft, puckered, rounded – emphasising the indent of the tear. Smocked Figure depicted the simple shape of a pregnant woman weeping. Her body was made from cream linen, the outline of her pregnancy framed in a closely-stitched band of rainbow thread to mark out isolation. The cream back cloth was worked in smocking, the tight pleating of fabric, to suggest compression, the emotional ambivalence some women feel on becoming pregnant. This was Chicago using all the armoury needlework had to offer – the form it took, the techniques involved, the nature of fabric, the different effects embroidery could produce, its physicality – to articulate emotion.
But, of all her work, it is the Dinner Party which has been hailed as her masterpiece. Judy Chicago might chafe against the fact that among her varied and extensive portfolio of artworks in different media, it is this work which has not just been now accepted by the art world but given an iconic status. Its elevation is not only because of its scale and the controversy which surrounded its exhibition but because it accelerated the accepted status of both women’s art and women’s craft. It recalibrated needlework’s value and demonstrated how an underrated medium was a potent form through which women, using its visual and textural language, its historical connotations, could better describe and communicate the world they experienced. I went to see it when it came to Edinburgh in 1984 but I had not expected the seriousness of it, the darkened room, the table lit like a sacrificial altar, the silence of its audience as they tiptoed around its edges, their reverence. Chicago had wanted to echo the sacramental, and create an artwork where the women it represented were honoured, and in the silence which accompanied its viewing, had their voices heard.
With these feminist artists, textile art came of age and has remained a central element of contemporary art, made by men as well as women. It has become an art form in its own right, written about, critiqued, analysed, collected and exhibited. Its creators are now legion, experimentation continuing to push back the boundaries of what fabric and sewing can express, the materials it can encompass, the different ways others can be involved in its genesis. Today textile artists can connect online, share techniques, show their work and are no longer dependent on a gallery system to curate and disseminate their work. They can also, unlike the feminist artists of the 1960s and 70s, access a sewn heritage through the digital archives of museums and galleries, or at least access what remains of it and what is available to tell of its purpose and cultural meaning.
Needlework which remained within families or tribal groups was cherished as emotional and cultural connectors between generations. But these were private treasures, only precious to those who safeguarded them. Most historical needlework collected by or donated to public institutions is divorced from its social and emotional purpose. It has no voice. With no provenance, beyond where and when it was bought or found, it is displayed, if at all, in isolation as an example of a specific technique or a marker of a specific culture. The identity and motive of its maker are immaterial and what is meant by it goes largely un-investigated. The nuanced stitching of its creators, like that of the Bayeux Tapestry, is of little interest. It is the object itself which matters. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has over seventy thousand textiles, the National Museum of Scotland over twenty thousand and there are millions of textiles worldwide languishing in museum storerooms. Most have scant information on who made them. The word most commonly attached to their descriptions is ‘anonymous.’ Designated as ‘orphan’ objects, most of the textiles in global collections remain unseen with their stories unheard.
Our needlework heritage is vulnerable. Their very portability makes them more likely to be folded away and forgotten. The fabric and thread is susceptible to damage by light and dust. Lack of care can equate with lack of perceived value. If their significance is not recognised they are put away in attics, or drawers or simply discarded. Much has been lost already. The Bayeux Tapestry lay unseen, apart from a short annual outing at the Feast of Relics, for five hundred years; most of the embroideries of Mary, Queen of Scots were lost, sold or destroyed; one of Lorina Bulwer’s long stitched scrolls was found in a local market, another abandoned in an attic, both discovered and identified one hundred years after their making; the beautiful cloth embroidered by veterans of the First World War for St Paul’s Cathedral was thought to have been destroyed in the bombing of the church and rediscovered seventy years later in an old chest in the cathedral. The British patchwork quilt made in Changi prison languished in a drawer of the Red Cross for decades before its historical value was recognised. The tray cloth, a unique first-hand account of the women’s arrival at the prison ended up at a jumble sale and many of the embroideries of John Craske, as his biographer Julia Blackburn discovered, lie invisible in the storerooms of museums.
But, perversely, abandonment can lead to survival for some. Rare medieval embroideries, were found at the start of the millennium, wrapped in an old blanket, by a house-clearer in Mayfair; the only surviving piece of clothing in Queen Elizabeth I’s vast wardrobe was discovered in 2016, refashioned from a skirt to a wall hanging for a church in Norfolk; a seventeenth century depiction of a bare-breasted Mary Magdalene was unearthed from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s ‘orphan’ objects in 2006, providing a tantalising anomaly to what women were thought to be sewing at the time. In 2011 a trove of embroideries was found in the wine cellar of Edinburgh College of Arts, where it had lain unseen for fifty years. It was part of the Needlework Development Scheme, a study loan scheme of historical and contemporary textiles set up by Scotland’s four art schools, the textiles distributed amongst them when the scheme came to an end in 1961. And, in a charity shop in Leeds in 2017 a textile which had lain neglected in the shop for ten years, was re-discovered and was confirmed as a historically important banner, possibly the backdrop to the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst’s public meetings. In 2018 a large patchwork with the embroidered names of sixty First World War soldiers, made by them while convalescing in North Staffordshire Infirmary, was found folded inside a pillowcase at the death of its owner, a hundred years after it was made.
Where people have left little textual evidence of their lives, their embroideries gain greater significance as insights into their domestic and social worlds. How such material evidence is interpreted and displayed is of vital importance to its reinstatement. As lost or abandoned objects, their currency is diminished, even if we have reports of them. Descriptions, as those of the now lost autobiographical bed hangings Mary, Queen of Scots left to her son, Prince James, cannot convey more than scale and content. They cannot replace the interpretation of the eye: the emotional presence of the sewer’s voice translated through needlework. Visibility heightens their understanding.
But it is not only the loss of visibility of textiles that we should mourn, but the visibility of the process of sewing, too. Needlework is no longer a common activity in people’s homes or something we see women doing on the sunny doorsteps of rural villages. It is no longer an integral part of our lives. The act has become separate from the object, the maker from what they have made, and with it we have lost its emotional and social potency: its currency as a form of human communication. Patterns, stitches and techniques have become so dislocated from their original cultural messages that their meaning no longer resonates.
There is now, h
owever, a growing interest in the material history and culture of those whose lives have been least represented in our museums and, until recent decades, neglected by historians and an increased emphasis on researched and archived needlework. The Quilt Alliance was established in the United States in 1993 to document and preserve the history of quilts and quiltmakers and has recorded interviews with over one thousand quilters and collectors. Its three-minute video oral history project Go Tell It continues to gather information from quilt enthusiasts. When the Quilters’ Guild organised a Heritage Project in the U.K. between 2014 and 2017, over four thousand unknown quilts were recorded. There are archives of campaign banners at the Peoples’ History Museum in Manchester, both actual and digital, and at the Peace Museum in Bradford; the London’s Women’s Library has a collection of suffrage banners with documentation on their designers and makers and there are, increasingly, more detailed online archives of the needlework collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and other significant museums around the world. These at least, are preserving the voices and experiences of those who sewed, through the images of their needlework which persist. For those that are irretrievable, unconventional methods of rescuing information are being adopted. Bridget Long of the University of Hertfordshire turned to the records of the Old Bailey court in London to investigate the use and value of quilts between 1610 and 1820. For her 2014 thesis, Anonymous Patchwork, she studied the quantitative and qualitative data available through the recording of trials for the theft of quilts. Through this she could establish a much clearer picture of their financial and cultural value and level of ownership in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England.
But, while those which are lost are seldom retrieved, the store of meaningful textiles is being replenished through projects which seek to involve people in translating their voices into fabric and thread. One of the most inspiring took place on 10th June 2018 when thousands of women gathered in Britain’s capital cities to process through their streets in honour of the suffragettes who had similarly gathered there one hundred years before them.
In an event called Processions, the performance art organisation Artichoke created a living portrait of women in the twenty-first century with four simultaneous processions of thousands of women in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London. For Processions they wanted participants to make their own banners and, to help them make them, they needed a banner advisor – and so, they invited me to take on that role. On June 10th 2018, the mobilisation of thousands of women created moving rivers of colour and imagery in banners that voiced who they were and what mattered to them. Women literally walked in the footsteps of their great grandmothers, processing the same routes the suffragettes had taken for their rallies at the start of the twentieth century.
I joined the procession in Edinburgh with thousands of other women. When I reached the top of the Mound, a high point in the city, I looked down its curve to Princes Street, Edinburgh’s main thoroughfare, and all I could see were streams of women wearing the violet, white and green scarves the organisers had provided, now choreographed into thick bands of each colour in one ribbon of marchers. Amongst them were throngs of banners, pennants and decorated staffs. This was a camaraderie of women of all ages, cultures and backgrounds, vital and energetic, collectively, visually, proclaiming their presence.
I carried the banner I had made for the day: Mary, Queen of Scots, dancing, resplendent in a gown of cream and purple inscribed with embroidered words to encapsulate her life: ‘betrayal, miscarriage, power, defeat, friendship’. I walked with her on the route she last took as a humiliated prisoner, after her defeat at Carberry Hill in 1567, a defeat which led to her long-term captivity and ultimately to her execution. This, in my mind, was an act of restoration, ensuring her triumphant return to Holyrood Palace accompanied by a phalanx of women who no longer considered their place to be lesser, their power diminishable or their voices unheard.
Later, I asked one of Scotland’s national co-ordinators of Processions, what she felt the project had achieved. She cited the vast presence of women in a public space, the democracy of the project being open to anyone who wanted to take part. The process of banner-making, sitting around a table together, working collectively brought people together, some as unlikely collaborators, in shared creativity. The material presence of the banners added another layer to the event as a representation of the social fabric of women’s lives, as varied in size, shape, character as the participants themselves. She felt that the level of response to the invitation to use needlework to express individual and collective lives was both surprising and overwhelming. When I asked Janet, who runs my local village shop and who, with fourteen other local women, made a banner to carry on the day what she thought, she said how important it was to her, as a sewer, that the project had enabled sewing skills to be passed on to a younger generation. And she had been surprised by how emotional she had found the day itself. She hadn’t expected to feel such a strong sense of belonging, both to the women in her own group and to the unknown women around her. It was the respect shown to the women present and their respect for the struggles of women in the past – manifested in their coming in their thousands to pay homage – which she will remember, that and the glorious spectacle of their banners held high above them. But claiming a presence, a voice, through needlework need not always be done through such large-scale demonstrations. Sometimes it is the least remarkable, the simplest form, that has most to say: Jan Ruff-O’Hern’s handkerchief, the headscarves of Les Madres de Plaza de Mayo and, in South Africa, the lapel of Ruth First’s dressing gown.
During apartheid in South Africa, in 1963 the resistance fighter Ruth First was incarcerated in solitary confinement for 117 days, the first white woman to be detained without charge under the Ninety-Day Detention Law. She maintained her identity through her embroidery. Secretly, under the lapel of her dressing gown, she began to mark down each day of her imprisonment by stitching row upon row of black lines in groups of six, and on the seventh day she sewed a stroke. Then she realised that, through her sewing, she could control time. Some days she wouldn’t sew at all leaving two or three days to mark down later in the week thereby gaining time. Or she would unpick a day and redo it again to regain time. Stitching this self-made calendar became an act of unofficial recording, a diary of sorts. Refused the means to write by the guards, this simple needlework, hidden from view, was a small act of rebellion against her loss of freedom. In prison, when she had no power over her life or her death, she could still make time for herself. Even in this, through the most basic act of sewing, needlework could communicate her spirit and manifest her defiant voice. By the time she was assassinated in 1982 she had published a short autobiography in which she documented her days of sensory deprivation and the significance of her sewing to express her sense of self.
Needlework can record history, convey complex social information about people’s status, relationships, beliefs, origin and allegiances. It can conserve memory, protecting and preserving personal and collective testimonies. It has a vital role to play in archiving tradition and telling people’s stories in a medium that carries emotional and physical meaning. Fabric and thread can convey a prayer, trace out a map, proclaim a manifesto, send out a warning, bestow a blessing, celebrate a culture and commemorate lives lived and lost. Lives expressed not just through images but through texture and colour, different kinds of stitches, the various processes of piecing, patching, recycling, quilting to more clearly articulate the different layers of our humanity and manifest the fabric of our lives. Sewing is a way to mark our existence on cloth: patterning our place in the world, voicing our identity, sharing something of ourselves with others and leaving the indelible evidence of our presence in stitches held fast by our touch.
Ending
You cut a length of thread, knot one end and pull the other end through the eye of a needle. You take a piece of fabric and you think about what you are going to make, what you are going to say, who it will
be for and what others will be able to read from it. And you consider what patterns and motifs you might use in this embroidery. Will it have a story or will its message be told in symbols – readable to future generations? Will it hold sewn promises of protection, blessings from the heart, warnings to spirits who might wish harm? You choose colours with care to convey specific emotions. You look through your collection of adornments, the tiny glittering sequins, the box of beads, the braid of jig jigging pompoms and select all or some to add when the embroidery is complete. Then you push your threaded needle in one side of the cloth and pull it out on the other, on and on in rhythmic sewing, until you have made something that matters: a thing of beauty and meaning, an embroidery that holds your spirit fast within its threads.
Bibliography
Threads of Life has involved extensive research and reading. It would be impossible to list every book where I have found a nugget of useful or illuminating information or insight. But there are some which either provide more in-depth study of specific subjects or that I found particularly interesting. Many are sadly out of print but they can be found through second-hand booksellers and libraries.